Weblog set up by Seven Kings High School MFL department to help KS4 Spanish students prepare for Oral GCSE exams. This is an area for KS4 Spanish students to come and listen to some example speaking exams to help them with their own preparation. The site is under construction at the moment. We hope that you will find this blog useful; please feel free to leave a comment at any time to give us feedback on how effective you think the website is. Please look at the How to Use section before you get started.

January 23, 2007

We have digitised cassette tapes of previous GCSE Spanish Speaking Exams and put them on this blog for you to listen to. Wherever possible we have shared the candidates eventual grade for the Speaking Exam only and points awarded.

Listening to the conversations on this blog should give you some idea of the standard of exam performances and the kind of things that you should be saying during the oral. Please be patient; these are authentic exams and so there are mistakes, pauses and occasionally some audio interference on them.

To listen to a conversation; click the topic or grade standard that you want to see. That will show only the recordings that match your criteria. Choose a recording, click the play button and listen!

Role plays are in the process of being added to the blog. As you probably know, there are 3 categories of role-plays in the speaking exams, A B and C role-plays. These are categorised in the same way as the conversation files; click on either All role-plays or B or C role-plays to see a full list of the role-plays in that category. The cards that are shown with each recording are the same cards that were given to the candidate before the exam. Read these as you listen so you can follow the conversation.

Some points to think about when listening;

Language used - did you understand the conversation? If it was an A or A* recording, can you pinpoint the phrases that made it high level?

How could the candidate have improved their conversation performance?

If the speaker didn't know a particular word, what did they do to get around it?

Were there lots of pauses?

Did the speaker sound confident?

Were they able to ask questions if they needed to, to clarify the task?